Under the current Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards, a WTRU is required to estimate a transmission power for each TFC. In the case that a certain TFC would require more transmission power than the maximum allowed WTRU transmission power, the WTRU should limit the usage of that TFC.
The WTRU continuously evaluates which TFCs can be used for transmission. The evaluation is performed using the estimated WTRU transmit power of a given TFC. When any TFC is restricted for exceeding a transmit power limit, the medium access control (MAC) entity in the WTRU notifies an upper layer to reduce the data rate, if applicable.
Under the current 3GPP standards, a WTRU has only one coded composite transport channel (CCTrCH) in uplink transmission. Therefore, the WTRU transmit power is the transmit power of the CCTrCH, which is determined by the TFC used for the CCTrCH.
In order to improve uplink coverage, throughput and transmission latency for uplink transmissions, enhanced uplink (EU) is currently being investigated in 3GPP. With EU implementation, a WTRU may have more than one CCTrCH in uplink transmissions; one for the regular dedicated channel (DCH) and the other for EU enhanced dedicated channel (E-DCH). In this case, the WTRU transmit power will be the sum of the transmit power of two CCTrCHs.
The WTRU transmit power is determined jointly by the TFCs of the two CCTrCHs. The combination of the TFC used by the dedicated CCTrCH and the TFC used by the EU CCTrCH is defined as the TFC pair of the WTRU whose transmit power is determined jointly by the TFCs of the two CCTrCHs. This is not an optimal method of determining the TFCs for more than one CCTrCH.
There is a need for an efficient method for selecting a combination of TFCs for more than one CCTrCHs in uplink transmission.